have been nobody at all, and Zola without pains might as well have been a waiter.  Nor is it only the little or the clumsy artists who have found inspiration in labour.  It is a pity we have not first drafts of all the great poems in the world:  we might then see how much of the magic of literature is the result of toil and how much of the unprophesied wind of inspiration.  Sir Sidney Colvin recently published an early draft of Keats’s sonnet, “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art,” which showed that in the case of Keats at least the mind in creation was not “as a fading coal,” but as a coal blown to increasing flame and splendour by sheer “labour and study.”  And the poetry of Keats is full of examples of the inspiration not of first but of second and later thoughts.  Henry Stephens, a medical student who lived with him for time, declared that an early draft of Endymion opened with the line: 

  A thing of beauty is a constant joy

—­a line which, Stephens observed on hearing it, was “a fine line, but wanting something.”  Keats thought over it for a little, then cried out, “I have it,” and wrote in its place: 

  A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

Nor is this an exceptional example of the studied miracles of Keats.  The most famous and, worn and cheapened by quotation though it is, the most beautiful of all his phrases—­

    magic casements, opening on the foam
  Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn—­

did not reach its perfect shape without hesitation and thinking.  He originally wrote “the wide casements” and “keelless seas”: 

    the wide casements, opening on the foam
  Of keelless seas, in fairy lands forlorn.

That would probably have seemed beautiful if the perfect version had not spoiled it for us.  But does not the final version go to prove that Shelley’s assertion that “when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline” does not hold good for all poets?  On the contrary, it is often the heat of labour which produces the heat of inspiration.  Or rather it is often the heat of labour which enables the writer to recall the heat of inspiration.  Ben Jonson, who held justly that “the poet must be able by nature and instinct to pour out the treasure of his mind,” took care to add the warning that no one must think he “can leap forth suddenly a poet by dreaming he hath been in Parnassus.”  Poe has uttered a comparable warning against an excessive belief in the theory of the plenary inspiration of poets in his Marginalia, where he declares that “this untenable and paradoxical idea of the incompatibility of genius and art” must be “kick[ed] out of the world’s way.”  Wordsworth’s saying that poetry has its origin in “emotion recollected in tranquillity” also suggests that the inspiration of poetry is an inspiration that may be recaptured by contemplation and labour.  How eagerly one would study a Shakespeare